Glimmer & aska
by vikung-fu
Summary: The Hikari Studio arrives on a dead world covered by a blanket of darkness and rich with the buzzing of flies. As the rain falls, as the autumn leaves fall, in this blackest night, what kind of Rider could emerge from a world such as this? Faint mention of a previous story from 10 years ago, Decadi. K for slight horror.


**Glimmer & aska**

There was a sound like flies buzzing in his ears, an agitated insect whisper that seemed to fill the murky darkness beyond the steps of the Hikari Studio. The crafted pink plastic and black rubber of the camera felt like a dead weight in his hands, held half-raised to his eye, its own lens blank and unseeing.

Before him stretched out the solemn and anaemic stones of the lost and departed, rain spattered and faded with age, a lonely memorial in a forgotten cemetery.

"Black," he mused softly, reflecting on the lack of detail the portrait had offered him.

Once before, Kadoya Tsukasa had found himself derailed for his journey through the nine parallel worlds that had formed a path before him. On that occasion, he had found himself confronted by a man wearing the armour of a different decade, a reflection of himself dressed in wood and iron. Here, however, there was no indication of what the world held, nothing but the roiling clouds and perpetual rain.

He descended the steps of the studio, crossing soft, damp grass, his shoes sinking into the loam with each step he took. Either side of the path that led from the steps of the quaint photography studio, windows and wooden façade both weathered now by the ceaseless rain, there were solemn stone memorials of the dead, ancient monuments to those who had once lived, the names long since eroded, the stones themselves covered in moss.

He turned slowly from right to left, and, as far as he could see, in the silent shape of the city that lurked beyond this small plot of land, there was silence, the only sound being the howl of the wind, the fall of the rain, the faint buzzing of flies.

"Woah," said a voice from behind him as Onodera Yusuke pushed his way out of the door, lifting both hands to shield his head from the rain and then pausing to regard Tsukasa's black suit and white shirt. He grinned boyishly. "Tsukasa, you look just like an undertaker."

Behind Yusuke, Natsumi followed, the sound of her heels on the stone step making a reassuring noise, something to remind him that there was at last some life in this awful new world, Tsukasa thought.

"Tsukasa," she said with a frown, her eyebrows meeting in the middle, "that look doesn't suit you at all."

"Oh?" he shrugged, turning away from the pair of them. "If you keep frowning like that, your face might stay that way once the wind changes, Natsumikan."

He lifted the eyepiece of the camera again, depressing the shutter, taking another picture just to confirm his suspicions.

"_Tsukasa_!" Natsumi shouted angrily, yet he held up a hand to quiet her, a frown settling on his own face as he once more lowered the camera.

"There's something very wrong with this world," he mused, almost to himself.

Coldly, the wind blew up about them once again, a gust of autumn leaves passing them by, torn from the skeletal branches of trees and dancing upon the graves.

"Something very wrong," he said again, tapping the side of the camera with a finger, taking another step forward, looking critically around.

From beneath the soil, there came a heavy thud.

Reaching into his pocket, Kasoya Tsukasa drew forth a single card, its side decorated with a barcode, a familiar magenta armour depicted on its face.

Another thud.

"T-Tsukasa," Yusuke said nervously, taking hold of Natsumi's arm. "Tsukasa, what _was_ that?"

From beneath the ground, something shifted, a dull sound like the splintering of wood, the wrestling of something long buried now stirring into action.

Angrily, Natsumi shook Yusuke off her and gave him a shove forward, pushing him stumbling down the steps to Tsukasa's side.

Ahead of them, from beneath a grave adorned with rotting lilies, a hand burst out of the soil, white gloved and covered in soil.

Yuusuke jumped back in surprise, his eyes widening.

Slowly, but surely, the ground churned, the shape of a rotting, skeletal figure emerging, the right eye of its mask shattered, maggots spilling out between the shards of broken glass.

"The earth… _cries out_," the dead figure moaned, dirt besmirching the red breastplate of its armour, the tarnished 'S' that adorned it.

Slowly, confidently, Tsukasa lifted his arm, flicked the card between his fingers and dropped his arm to his side, flashing the card before the belt at his waist, triggering the fateful summoning of his own armour.

From the distance, another grave broke open, the shambling shape of a second corpse rising up, rotting black armour, strengthened skin and taut muscle, a black veneer decorated with stripes of yellow and red, the lens of the helm a blood red.

From within an adjacent realm, a dimension in which his armour waited patiently to be summoned into existence by the man who had inherited it—the man destined to connect all, to _destroy_ all—that magenta and black emerged shape, Dai-Shocker's most prized weapon gone awry, wrapping itself about Tsukasa in a flash of brilliant white light.

So, this was their next world, he reflected, a world of dead Riders, a world in which all those heroes of the past had fallen and been reanimated by some evil curse. He tensed, tightening his gloved fists, sensing rather than hearing the sound of Yusuke's own transformation at his back. This would be a true challenge, something to really test his armour.

"Natsumi," he called out, "get back inside."

The maggot-ridden shape of the first undead Rider began to heave itself out of the soil, lifting itself up from its final resting place on withered arms.

"This," he remarked with a wry smile as further graves broke open, further shapes emerging from the ground, "This might tickle a bit."

Above them, the black rain continued to fall.


End file.
